


Same Mistakes

by AliceInKinkland



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Community: femslash_minis, F/F, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-06
Packaged: 2018-04-13 05:55:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4510380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Is this what heaven felt like for you?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



> Prompt: for kwritten, who wanted the Weakerthans lyrics “how I don’t know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you/ how you don’t know where you should look so you look at my hands/ how movements rise and then dissolve, melted by our shallow breath,” (from Pampleteer), sadness/melancholy without comfort, awkward silences, established relationship, and no fluff or non/dubcon.
> 
> Notes: I’m not sure whether there is any truth to the rumour that Whedon considered having the Powers That Be grant Buffy a wish at the end of Chosen and having Buffy wish to bring Tara back. That seems like a really poorly-thought-out plot point to me, but interesting nonetheless. Anyway, for the purposes of this fic that is what happened.

It had something to do with the hope of a shared knowledge, Tara thinks—that was what they were both searching for at first. Whether they wanted commiseration over the experience of pulling someone out of the afterlife or that of being brought back oneself, she’s less sure. She struggles to remember the specifics of their first tentative approaches—a smile here, a hand there, in between phone calls and paperwork and motel check-ins and everything else that apparently has to be taken care of after you destroy a hellmouth and take your entire hometown down with it.

Well. It’s not really Tara’s hometown. Not really Buffy’s either, for very different reasons. And that’s the problem, isn’t it—on the surface, their experiences seem analogous, but really, they aren’t. When Buffy brought Tara back, she just made some wish to the Powers, which isn’t at all the same thing as a night in a graveyard with blood and snakes and the bitter taste of fear in the back of your throat. Conversely, when Tara helped bring Buffy back Tara is pretty sure Buffy spent quite a long time wanting to die, and Tara hasn’t felt that way once in the month since she has known touch and hunger and sadness again. No, her melancholy tastes less like a mourning for the heaven she still feels sometimes in half-sleep and more like one for the time she missed here, for the things her death birthed. In everyone, but especially in Willow.

Here’s another reason Tara shouldn’t want to be with Buffy: Tara is fairly certain Buffy brought her back more for Willow’s benefit than for Tara’s own. Tara was meant to be Willow’s prize for redemption, and no one—not Buffy, not Dawn, not Kennedy, not even Willow—expected the way Tara recoiled at Willow’s joyful first embrace. Someone who is not Tara would hold this against Buffy— _Buffy, of all people, should know what it really means to be brought back from the dead for someone else’s happiness_ —but she can’t bring herself to hold a grudge. Perhaps that’s one of the things she and Buffy do have in common—a habit of easy forgiveness that tends to hurt both their hearts.

Today, they are meant to discuss the future, a future that neither of them expected to have. There is cold coffee, and the buzz of fluorescent diner lights, and the sticky feeling of hot legs on plastic booths. Buffy has taken off her cross necklace and is playing with the thin chain, and Tara can’t stop looking at those fingers, those pink-painted nails and bruised knuckles, mostly because she isn’t sure where else to look.

“I’m sorry,” Buffy says again.

Tara swallows. “Is this a breaking-up thing? It’s OK. If it is.” Like a script. These are the things you are supposed to say.

Buffy is pulling at the cross, and Tara is worried it will come apart in her hands. No, Tara is worried about other things. The hands are not the point right now. They are not what she should be looking at.

“No,” says Buffy, in a tone that means, _maybe_. “It’s a…checking-in thing. It’s a what-are-we-doing-here thing. I don’t…I know what I was like. When I came back. I was…vulnerable. And I needed, I mean, I thought I wanted…I don’t want to be taking advantage of you, Tara. I don’t want to use you.”

Tara looks at her own hands now. Her thigh still presses against Buffy’s, just like when they first sat down here an hour ago. Two girls crowded together in a diner booth in Fresno, California, like some 50’s Coke commercial minus the smiles.

“Is this about Willow leaving?” Tara asks, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. She worked so hard, those last few months before her death, to unlearn her ability to say only what others wanted to hear. Now she wants it back. Everyone around her has superpowers; who says that wasn’t meant to be hers?

Buffy sighs, then. It feels like there are enough words in front of them to build a novel, or some really complex magic. Another resurrection spell, maybe. Most are words they’ve already said: _is this OK?_ jostles up against _I should have thought harder about my wish; I think you’re beautiful_ pushes back against _is this worth how much it could hurt them all?_

Tara wants to defeat it all with a kiss, but she knows that’s not a way to fix anything for real. Maybe death has made her wiser, or maybe she has always known that the power of kisses is limited, even in the moments when the urge to skip all the drawn-out silences was too strong to resist.

(Once, early on in their relationship, Buffy watched Tara’s face as she made Tara come, her fingers still slightly clumsy at touching another girl. Tara opened her eyes to see Buffy above her, Buffy’s look of concentration morphing into one of curiosity. _Is that what heaven felt like for you?_ she asked, slowly pulling her fingers out of Tara. Tara shook her head no.

 _Me neither,_ Buffy said after a moment).

“I just want to make sure I’m not making the same mistakes again,” says Buffy finally.

Tara watches as Buffy’s fingers pull at the cross necklace once more, yankyankyank until one side of the clasp detaches from the chain. She nods.

“Me too.”


End file.
